The airline, which recently unveiled the world’s only luxury-class terminal at Frankfurt airport, was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its first flight little more than a week after announcing the takeover of Swiss International Air Lines and reporting a healthy operating profit of 383 million Eur ($501 million) for 2004.

From its humble beginnings with a "fleet" of five aircraft serving grand total of 12 German airports, Lufthansa has grown into one of the world’s leading airlines, last year carrying more than 50 million passengers to destinations in every corner of the globe.

Today, the German carrier travels to and from 176 destinations in 74 countries on over 6,200 weekly flights, with that number nearly doubling if flights offered by Lufthansa’s Star Alliance partner airlines are also taken into account.

All of that is a far cry from the launch of Lufthansa’s passenger services on April 1, 1955.

On that day, two Convair 340 planes took off in the early morning hours, one from Hamburg heading to Munich and the other from Munich heading in the opposite direction, each with only a handful of passengers onboard.

From there, the fledgling carrier sped from one "first" to the next.

Just two months after its maiden flight, on June 8, 1955, Lufthansa opened its transatlantic flight operations with a Lockheed "Super Constellation." The route started in Hamburg and ended in New York, with stops in Duesseldorf and Shannon, Ireland.

The following year, Lufthansa traversed the South Atlantic and added connections to three Middle East destinations — Istanbul, Baghdad and Tehran.

In 1959, the carrier began service to Asia with routes to Calcutta and Bangkok. Service to Africa came in 1960, while Lufthansa’s inaugural East Asian flight touched down in Tokyo a year later.

In the carrier’s early years, Lufthansa’s planes were all propeller-driven, but the company quickly realized that the future of civil aviation belonged to the jet aircraft. Less than two years after its inaugural flight, Lufthansa ordered its first four Boeing 707 long-haul aircraft, setting the stage for its first transatlantic jet flight in 1960.

That tradition of innovation continues to this day as the company prepares to add the world’s largest passenger aircraft to its fleet. As one of the first customers for the Airbus A380 "superjumbo," Lufthansa will begin operating the plane on major routes in 2007.

With its 262-foot wingspan and a tail as tall as a seven-story building, the plane can be configured according to the service airlines want to sell, with some carriers planning to offer first- and business-class passengers gyms, beauty parlors, bars and even casinos and double beds.

Perhaps more importantly, the A380 is more fuel-efficient than its predecessors and is expected to cut total air traffic emissions by carrying more passengers on long routes linking Asia and the Middle East to Europe and the United States.

Looking further ahead, Lufthansa expects to continue "flying high."